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3 September, 2003
'Shrooms with a View
"By the way, today is the first day of hunting season," said Tadashi Ogi as we prepared for our Labor Day expedition.
 Unearthing a pair of matsutake. |
As we looked up in alarm, Ogi pulled one arm back with the other extended, and added cheerfully, "Don't worry though - no guns, just bow and arrows."
Some comfort - bow-hunters will be combing the hills while we're bending over, hunting for matsutake mushrooms. I briefly imagined an arrow sticking out of my backside and then banished the thought and concentrated on the task at hand: Inventorying my tools.
Gardening gloves. Check. Long stick (an antique dandelion weed digger with tape wrapped around its handle to protect me from splinters). Check. Brush to clean off the mushrooms. Check. Empty 50-pound Kokuho Rose rice sack to carry back the day's find. Check. Sweet Japanese snacks to fend off the chill morning air. Check.
We were ready to do our own hunting: rooting out matsutake mushrooms in the mountains of Colorado.
Hunting for matsutake is a time-honored Japanese tradition, and one that Japanese Americans in Colorado happily get to indulge in more often than in Japan, where matsutake has become a rarified commodity. Not that it's not around here - the stuff currently costs $19.95 a pound at Pacific Mercantile, the Japanese grocery store in Sakura Square.
The matsutake is a medium-to-large sized wild mushroom (it can't be cultivated) that translates to "pine mushroom" and is distinguished by its general proximity to pine trees and to the pungent, piney flavor it adds to soups and foods when it's cooked.
Matsutake has always been special - for centuries in Japan, matsutake were only eaten by nobility and the imperial court, and matsutake is still given as a highly-prized gift. It's expensive, all right, but for Japanese Americans, it wasn't always so rare.
Just decades ago, matsutake-hunting was a seasonal social event for the JA community, with whole families packing picnic lunches of musubi (rice balls) and teriyaki chicken and those same tools I had checked off -- my stick belonged to my fiancée Erin's grandfather. These family outings would result in bags and bags of matsutake, which would then be meticulously cleaned, sliced and frozen for use throughout the year, with bags shipped off to relatives in less fortunate, matsutake-barren locales.
 Tadashi Ogi shows us how it's done. |
Ogi-san, who's been known to add slices of matsutake to bowls of miso soup at his Lakewood restaurant, Sushi Uokura, is an expert matsutake hunter. He even spent a few hours the previous day in Wyoming, and says he hauled home 100 pounds of matsutake. He says he sends the mushrooms to friends and family, but do the math - I saw dollar signs in my mind, and a new career as a mushroomer.
When he first moved to Colorado seven years ago, Ogi spent three weeks criss-crossing the mountains west of Denver and identified his favorite matsutake locales. Every matsutake hunter jealously guards the locale of his or her motherlode like the site of buried treasure - which I guess it is. In writing about this trip, I was told not by Ogi but my future mother-in-law, that I better not reveal even the slightest detail about the place, lest it be over-run by others when we could go back and reap its rewards ourselves.
Suffice it to say we drove an indeterminate distance west from Denver and found ourselves in a verdant pine forest on a mountainside, rich with loose loam recently made richer by two days of rain.
Ogi led the way, and we followed, first easily but soon huffing and puffing as he crossed over a babbling brook and went to his first favorite spot. He found a couple of mushrooms and pointed out to me - a mushroom hunting virgin - what to look for: The slightest hump of dark earth covered by dead dry pine needles. The hump was caused by a young mushroom just starting to poke its way from the earth to the light of day. But you had to really look to know it was a hump. I spent a few fruitless - or mushroomless - minutes poking at what turned out to be mounds of mere dirt.
Ogi got impatient, and said someone else had been through here and taken all the good ones. So he led us back across the brook and up the mountainside, until my chest was heaving with the effort of keeping up with this guy - he scampered uphill like a mountain goat. It was so quiet and peaceful near the peak of his mountain, I wished I could hear the soft rustling of the wind. Instead, all I could hear was the loud thump-thump of my heart trying to catch up with my legs.
 My haul for the day -- combined wth Erin's we did all right. |
On the other side of the mountain, we found something of a motherlode, another of Ogi's favorite secret spots. We were careful to pat the ground cover back down over spots where we had removed mushrooms, so that the spores could grow back. With some coaching, I managed to find a few matsutake on my own.
In fact, for a while I was completely in the zone like an athlete in the middle of a game, where everything is clear and mind and body work as one seamless machine. It seemed like everywhere I turned, I noticed these little mounds. I was soon tossing the pungent fungi into my rice sack like a seasoned pro. That is, until I lost my zone.
But so did Ogi, because he started telling us we needed to leave because the mushrooms were gone. He couldn't convince me of that, since he had two grocery bags stuffed with them. But we began trundling back downhill towards our cars, with an occasional stop whenever he saw those darned mounds. He saw a lot of them, too.
"This is a Nisei place, I see lot of old Nisei men all the time here," he started to explain. But just when he was telling us this area had been stripped bare by decades of Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) picking through, the matsutake seemed to be leaping at his feet. "I don't know why - I never see so many matsutake here. Never!"
Yeah, right.
We couldn't complain. Back at the car, we had almost 50 matsutake of varying sizes and shapes between our two bags, and they probably amounted to 20 pounds. Not that we'd ever sell the things, of course - we're just planning on eating them: matsutake omelet, matsutake sandwich, matsutake stir-fry, matsutake rice (a wonderful Japanese specialty), matsutake miso soup.
We'll probably find a way to serve matsutake for dessert.
This column was
first published online on DenverPost.com.